{"id":177,"date":"2014-06-18T18:30:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T22:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/?p=177"},"modified":"2014-06-18T18:30:54","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T22:30:54","slug":"va-7-is-david-brat-squandering-his-opportunity-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/va-7-is-david-brat-squandering-his-opportunity-2\/","title":{"rendered":"VA-7: Is David Brat Squandering his Opportunity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m fortunate enough to live in the 7th<\/sup> Congressional District of Virginia, so I\u2019m right in the middle of all the coverage of one of the biggest stories in domestic politics right now. One of the big stories has been the silence of David Brat for almost a week (as of the time I write this post) after his win. The nation was focused on him and his district, and it was a great chance for him to introduce himself to potential voters. But still we\u2019ve heard nothing from the Republican nominee.<\/p>

The recent work<\/a> in political science<\/a> argues that even presidents are unable to move public opinion through making speeches, and this has begun to infiltrate media accounts<\/a> of presidential power<\/a> as well.* However, what we haven\u2019t been able to examine is the counterfactual to a president speaking. We\u2019ve been missing the proverbial \u201cdog that didn\u2019t bark.\u201d We now have a great example of this, as we see the Republican nominee avoiding media attention after his upset victory. David Brat\u2019s lack of public presence in VA-07 after winning the primary shows us exactly the costs of failing to speak and failing to be prepared. Nowhere is this more evident than on reporter Parker Slaybaugh\u2019s Facebook feed<\/a> where he posted:<\/p>

I have tried for 2 days now to speak with Dave Brat after his victory over Eric Cantor and he and his campaign have told me he is not speaking at all publicly until maybe Monday. They say they are bring on more staff to help out. What do you think? Do you think he should have spoken to his constituents and to the media by now? Let me know in the comments below!<\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/i>While clearly looks like the Facebook equivalent of a push poll<\/a>, many of the commenters agreed strongly with the premise of this post. Cantor had been voted out in part because of his failure to connect with the district, so Brat\u2019s initial post-victory silence may have soured voters against him. While media appearances might not have helped his standing in the district, failing to appear certainly seems to be hurting him, at least in the short-term.<\/p>

This is a great example of where randomized experiments, the type preferred by political scientists and considered the gold standard in the academic literature on campaigns, can\u2019t help us understand politics. No candidate is going to let us randomly decide whether he will be available to the press after the campaign, nor is any president. But we don\u2019t want to let the availability of experiments limit the types of questions we can answer and what we can learn about politics. So we have to look for natural experiments, where a candidate is \u201cassigned\u201d to a treatment condition through factors outside his control. Brat\u2019s unexpected win is a great example of a candidate being caught unprepared and forced to react, and offers us a great chance to learn the costs of a candidate not going public.<\/p>

 <\/p>

Chad Murphy<\/p>

Fellow \u2013 HaystaqDNA<\/p>

Assistant Professor of Political Science \u2013 University of Mary Washington<\/p>

 <\/p>

——————————<\/p>

*For a counterpoint to this line of work, see my work with former student Annie Morris<\/a> showing that presidents are able to change the behavior of members of Congress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m fortunate enough to live in the 7th Congressional District of Virginia, so I\u2019m right in the middle of all the coverage of one of the biggest stories in domestic politics right now. 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